Class VIII Unit III - In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens

Alice Walker

Alice Walker was born on February 9, 1944 in Putnam County, Georgia. She was the youngest of eight children, to Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Lou Tallulah Grant. Her father earned only $300  a year from sharecropping and dairy farming. Her mother supplemented the family income by working as a maid. Landlords  expected the children of black sharecroppers to work in the fields at a young age.  But mother enrolled Alice in first grade at the age of four.

Growing up with an oral tradition, listening to stories from her grandfather (the model for the character of Mr. in The Color Purple), Walker began writing, very privately, when she was eight years old. "With my family, I had to hide things," she said. "And I had to keep a lot in my mind."

After high school, Walker went to Spelman College in Atlanta on a full scholarship in 1961 and later transferred to Sarah Lawrence College near New York City, graduating in 1965. Walker became interested in the U.S. civil rights movement in part due to the influence of activist Howard Zinn, who was one of her professors at Spelman College. Continuing the activism that she participated in during her college years, Walker returned to the South where she became involved with voter registration drives, campaigns for welfare rights, and children's programs in Mississippi.

On March 17, 1967, she married Melvyn Roseman Leventhal.

Walker's first book of poetry was written while she was a senior at Sarah Lawrence. Her 1975 article "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston", published in Ms. magazine, helped revive interest in the work of Zora Neale Hurston.

In addition to her collected short stories and poetry, Walker's first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, was published in 1970. In 1976, Walker's second novel, Meridian, was published. The novel dealt with activist workers in the South during the civil rights movement, and closely paralleled some of Walker's own experiences.

In 1982, Walker published what has become her best-known work, the novel The Color Purple.

The book became a bestseller and was subsequently adapted into a critically acclaimed 1985 movie as well as a 2005 Broadway musical.

She has published a number of collections of short stories, poetry, and other published work. She expresses the struggles of black people, particularly women, and their lives in a racist, sexist, and violent society. Her writings also focus on the role of women of color in culture and history.

Selected awards and honors

• Ingram Merrill Foundation Fellowship (1967)
• Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1983) for The Color Purple
• National Book Award for Fiction (1983) for The Color Purple
• O. Henry Award for "Kindred Spirits" 1985.
• Honorary Degree from the California Institute of the Arts (1995)
• American Humanist Association named her as "Humanist of the Year" (1997)
• The Lillian Smith Award from the National Endowment for the Arts
• The Rosenthal Award from the National Institute of Arts & Letters
• The Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, the Merrill Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship
• The Front Page Award for Best Magazine Criticism from the Newswoman's Club of New York
• Induction to the California Hall of Fame in The California Museum for History, Women, and the Arts (2006)
• Domestic Human Rights Award from Global Exchange (2007)
• The LennonOno Grant for Peace (2010)

Novels and short story collections

• The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970)
• In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women (1973)
• Meridian (1976)
• The Color Purple (1982)
• You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down: Stories (1982)
• To Hell With Dying (1988)
• The Temple of My Familiar (1989)
• Finding the Green Stone (1991)
• Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992)
• The Complete Stories (1994)
• By The Light of My Father's Smile (1998)
• The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart (2000)
• Now Is The Time to Open Your Heart (2005)
• Everyday Use (1973). Short stories, essays, interviews

Poetry collections

• Once (1968)
• Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems (1973)
• Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning (1979)
• Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful (1985)
• Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems (1991)
• Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth (2003)
• A Poem Traveled Down My Arm: Poems And Drawings (2003)
• Collected Poems (2005)
• Hard Times Require Furious Dancing: New Poems
• Non-fiction books[edit source | editbeta]
• In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983)
• Living by the Word (1988)
• Warrior Marks (1993)
• The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult (1996)
• Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer's Activism (1997)
• Go Girl!: The Black Woman's Book of Travel and Adventure (1997)
• Pema Chodron and Alice Walker in Conversation (1999)
• Sent By Earth: A Message from the Grandmother Spirit After the Bombing of the World Trade Center and Pentagon (2001)
• We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For (2006)
• Overcoming Speechlessness (2010)
• Chicken Chronicles, A Memoir (2011)